Active kernel monitoring to combat scheduler gaming in reconfigurable computing systems

Abstract

Effective reconfigurable hardware (RH) allocation plays a critical role in multi-tasking systems. Past RH scheduling research has focused on how to allocate RH based on the area and performance of competing hardware kernels. However, these approaches generally assume that the metrics associated with those hardware kernels are pre-determined. However, design-time estimates may not always be accurate or even stable. If the scheduler uses incorrect information, performance of one or more applications will suffer. In this paper, we adapt common performance-monitoring techniques to reconfigurable computing and quantify the importance of active performance monitoring of reconfigurable applications.